You dream of being an actor. You study for a few years, doing part time jobs to fund your training. You dream of the applause, the stage door of the Abbey, your own dressing room at Ardmore Studios. You attend every audition that comes your way. You practice your Oscar acceptance speech in private.

But two years down the road, the only speech you're making is one welcoming all the little boys and girls to Santa's grotto. The dream is still a lead role in a major production; the reality is having to don a pixie suit and spend an eight-hour day frolicking in front of hordes of giddy four-year-olds.

"It's tedious, annoying and you sweat a lot," says Edward Cosgrave, a DIT-trained actor responsible for co-ordinating the team of 20 actors working at SantaLand, a new Christmas show in Leopardstown Racecourse. Most days, Cosgrave wears a Batman or Superman costume, but he also takes his turn playing the children's television character, Bear (in the Big Blue House), which involves a heavy, nine-foot-high costume, with limited visibility and even more limited access to air. After three days, Cosgrave had already lost three of his actors "because of the conditions", but he remains remarkably sanguine himself. "I just see it as a financial thing, because it pays very well. Most actors have to get another job to support themselves, waiting tables or whatever, but at least with this job you are entertaining people. It can be really good fun and the reaction from the kids is overwhelming."

Although this is his second year in the Christmas business, having spent last Christmas as a Santa in D·n Laoghaire shopping centre, Cosgrave has his sights firmly set on a mainstream acting career. In the year since he graduated from college, he has directed and starred in a couple of fringe productions, several short films and a feature film, Crimson Underworld, directed by himself, which is in post-production. He still goes to two or three auditions a week, but as he says himself, "I wouldn't like to rely on acting. I do carpentry and tiling to make money, too. If you're just sitting round waiting for your big break, you're letting yourself in for a big let-down."

He agrees that some of his actor friends would turn their noses up at a job as Santa's little helper. "There is a snobbishness, and I must admit that after two weeks as Santa last year, I did say 'never again'. One fella, a great actor, that we hired, quit after one day saying, 'I can't do this. It's just too boring'. I think he thought he was too good for it, but I think that's a bad attitude."

Still, it's an attitude with which many elves and pixies would probably have sympathy; as one of the SantaLand actors remarks rather wearily, "Part of me does think 'Is this what I spent all that time and money training for?' " Yet good acting parts are scarce on the ground; directors are keen to use well-known faces, and every year sees a new crop of actors graduating from an ever-increasing number of acting schools. In the face of such competition and the very real possibility of a financial meltdown, it's little wonder that donning a pair of buckled shoes and a Wee Willy Winkie hat might not seem so bad.

"I never did anything like this in the US," says Amy Redmond, who arrived back in Ireland last September after six years of training and working as an actor abroad. Despite having worked in several productions with the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, she has found it hard to find work in Dublin.

"It's a smaller network. If you haven't trained here, you don't have the contacts, and it's harder to find work. I have an agent and I have been to auditions, but what I really need is one showcase. I haven't cracked it yet."

Her current job is unlikely to be that showcase. Every day Amy dons breeches, stripy socks, a multi-coloured shirt, a lot of glitter and orange munchkin-style face make-up to become Glitz, an elf guide in Santa's Kingdom, the Christmas fun park in Goff's.

Although she raves about the enthusiasm of the children as they react to the real snow and her tour of Santa's workshop, she is a little more measured when it comes to talking about working as an elf. "It's a long day and it's non-stop. You have to be up all the time, because it's the first time for each new group of kids." Traditionally, Santa's little helpers have not always been treated with festive courtesy. An Irish Times colleague who had a previous life as a Christmas elf reports having to go on strike (in costume) to get decent breaks.

Fortunately, both pay and conditions have improved in recent years as department stores and promotions companies have found Santas and elves increasingly hard to locate.

Still, there's always the problem of the parents, some of whom are distinctly lacking in Christmas spirit. There are reports of elves being swung at, while Brendan Hughes, who has spent every year since 1996 as a Santa Claus, is well used to comments from parents who "think you're not fat enough, or your beard isn't white enough".

Hughes is a rare breed in the Christmas entertainment world, in that he loves working as Santa Claus. A former senior manager at Irish Permanent, he took early retirement to pursue his first love, acting, and has since worked in productions such as Sondheim's Assassins in the Samuel Beckett Centre, as well as promotional work as a leprechaun, a clown and, of course, the man in red, a role he plays in the St Stephen's Green shopping centre this year. Meeting old colleagues while dressed as a leprechaun used to be an embarrassment, but he says he has learned to cope with that. Ditto, the long days spent in the grotto - Brendan uses his own beard and would cause a riot if he started to wander round at lunchtime, so he tends to send out for a sandwich and a Coke and kick back in the grotto.

"I'd like to get a bit more work in the theatre over the next couple of years because a part in a play is something you can really get your teeth into . . . But I'd still always like to do Santa at Christmas. It's one of things I really love in life, and I think that comes across to the kids."

But for actor Steve Ryan, donning a red suit was one compromise too far. He agreed to work as a saucy Santa Claus, at a golf club ladies' lunch two years ago, and now says "Never again" with a near-comic vehemence. "At the end of the day you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say 'What am I doing?' "

Ryan, who has been snowed under with commercials work recently, and is also up for a part in a Sky One television series, does concede that doing promotional work at Christmas is "Absolutely 100 per cent part of the process of being an actor. But then there does come a point when you have to nail your colours to the mast and say, 'I'm either going to take this seriously' or not. It's very much a personal choice - there are actors who won't even do commercials. Certainly, I think promotional work is the quickest way to get turned off the business."

While prancing around in a red suit is unlikely to harm your acting career - there are few hot-shot directors and agents queuing up at your average Santy's grotto - the psychological effects of doing work you neither enjoy nor respect can have an effect. "It's admitting to yourself that you're somewhere you don't want to be," says Ryan. "And you just have to get on with it."

It's not just your professional life you have to worry about, either . It might very well be your social life that's at risk too. "It's OK for two weeks, but any more than that, and you would go insane," says Edward Cosgrave. "I noticed after being a Santa last year, I was going to the pub to meet my friends and saying 'Hello and what's your name?' all the time. It does affect you."